Business
Business advice from Griffins – Jean Piercy answers your questions
How can my small business make the best use out of the funding and support available to us from the government and elsewhere? Michael
Dear Michael
What a great question! I frequently meet business owners who ask what funding and support is available to help their businesses but less so how to actually make use of what is available. In today’s world of information overload the first key issue is being able to identify quality over quantity. Then you need to assess which specific elements of funding and support will help you in the implementation of your business plans. My next question is always “Now you have all of this information, what are you going to do with it?”
Successful businesses and business people have often got where they are by just being very effective at the simple things in business. In such a volatile business environment keeping it simple and getting to the root cause of an issue is critical to success. Using one page business plans, focusing on three key issues, having simple processes and problem solving approaches are just some techniques that can be adopted to assist in keeping things simple. There is significant support available to help you develop these techniques, identify your own knowledge gaps and ensure you up skill where necessary. A good starting point could be to complete the free Growth and Profit Solutions diagnostic, accessible on griffins.co.uk
This will assist you to prioritise your:
n Top three business and growth issues
n Top three personal development barriers and most importantly;
n Top three strategies to address these key issues and the financial impact on your business of their implementation
Funding gaps hit most businesses at some time. Make sure that you have good cash flow forecasts so you are aware of any future shortfalls. If your business has a requirement for additional funding any application must be well thought out and backed up by sound commercial planning. It is a sad fact that, whilst funding is currently available, a significant number of applications fail because they do not meet these criteria. The latest £95m ‘grant’ offering from the Regional Growth Fund may sound encouraging but if you look at the small print these grants will be awarded alongside the award of a new bank loan on commercial terms. So sadly this attempt to unlock bank finance for small businesses will only help those that could have secured a loan anyway.
As a business it is vital that you know where you are now, have plans for where you will be in the future and then use the funding and support available to develop shorter term action plans to ensure that you reach the necessary milestones along the way to where you want to be.
For more information on business funding please contact Jean Piercy on (01635) 265265 or email j.piercy@griffins.co.uk.
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